The new Stalins must be kept in check

By Alex Goldfarb

12:01AM BST 18 Jul 2007

As Britain awaits Russia's retaliation for the expulsion of four of its diplomats, all the talk is of a return to the Cold War.

No wonder. The Russian handling of the Litvinenko affair seems familiar in its madness. Despite being caught practically red-handed performing an act of nuclear terrorism in their ally's capital, the Russians took the confrontational path.

They have obstructed investigation, conjured propaganda campaigns accusing MI6 of the murder and snubbed the British by calling their legal representations "foolishness".

What should Britain do in response to such unpredictability? Should it keep telling Russia that it is not in anyone's interests to escalate the crisis? Let the diplomatic salvoes subside and close the whole episode, with so many billions at stake on both sides?

Remarkably, the same kind of dilemmas were plaguing Western leaders 60 years ago, in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Moscow turned belligerent without provocation. Stalin rejected an honest invitation to join the family of nations and refused Western assistance in rebuilding his war-ravaged economy.

George Kennan, the diplomat and historian, knew exactly what to blame.

"At the bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs," he wrote in 1946, "is a traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity... which afflicted Russian rulers [who] have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation", and, by extension, unable to stand comparison with the West.

Soviet Communism, Kennan argued, was just the ideological wrapping of "uneasy Russian nationalism, a centuries-old movement in which conceptions of offence and defence are inextricably confused". Hence Russia's aggressiveness, which cannot be accommodated by Western appeasement since its roots lie in an intrinsic insecurity.

In an analysis of the mechanics of Kremlin power, Russian historian Irina Pavlova points to many features of Stalinism evident in present-day Russia: from the personification of the state in one leader, to the hidden nationwide infrastructure of governance based on appointed nomenklatura.

It's all camouflaged by the institutions of formal democracy - the parliament, elections, civic groups, and even a token opposition movement, whose only purpose is to legitimise the Kremlin's "managed democracy".

The neo-Stalinist system, writes Pavlova, has "a modern facade, has been cleansed of Communist ideology, but has the same old essence. Stalin was more of a Russian nationalist and imperialist - that is why he, rather than Lenin, is so popular in Russia today. His rule was a culmination of Russia's state power, which became an inspiration for today's conservative patriots."

Small wonder that the restoration of the Stalinist anthem became the ideological hallmark of Vladimir Putin's rule and the fall of the USSR described as "the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the 20th century" in his rendition of history.

Viewed against that backdrop, the Litvinenko affair starts to make some sense.

The Russians got prickly as soon as the British courts refused to extradite two of Mr Putin's arch-enemies: his former comrade-in-arms in the Kremlin power struggle Boris Berezovsky - in their eyes a modern-day Trotsky - and the Chechen politician Akhmed Zakayev, who does not fit their portrayal of the separatists as radical Muslim terrorists.

After this, a paranoid view of the outside world took hold in the Kremlin; Whitehall, the White House, the CIA, MI6, Chechen terrorists and Berezovsky were all conspiring to prevent Russia's effort to undo the "catastrophe" and restore the collapsed empire. London, to them, became a legitimate combat zone and the Berezovsky-Zakayev group became a legitimate target.

The discovery, by British detectives, of polonium-210 as the murder weapon was an unexpected mishap in an otherwise perfect murder. And so the Kremlin is holding firm; in its eyes, the slightest sign of weakness would be exploited to the peril of the country and its system of power. The offensive stance, in the Stalinist book, is the best defence.

Meanwhile, Britain is left wondering what happens next. But the key is how the resolution of this episode will affect the internal dynamics of power in Russia, particularly in view of the ongoing succession struggle. For this is surely what Putin's posturing is all about.

Russia is no longer a democracy. But it is not yet a Stalinist state either, and a large part of Russia's elite does not want a break-up with the West. Their markets are here. Their money is in the London banks. Their children go to British schools. They are the 10 per cent of the new Russian rich.

But they are pitted against a different kind of people, of whom Putin appears to be the champion - the bureaucracy of the emerging police state - internally and globally. Economically, they are associated with the military-industrial complex.

They view the West not as a partner and a customer, or even a competitor, but as a threat to their existence. They will use oil revenues not to rebuild the country, but to rearm it, and in the current fight between the West and radical Islam, they tend to view the latter with more sympathy.

So Britain must stand firm, and talk tough. Letting the polonium constituency get away with murder would be perceived as weakness and embolden the would-be Stalins in post-Putin Russia. Britain can't do it alone. It would require the common resolve of the whole of the Western alliance to make an impact.

The death of Sasha Litvinenko risks being a milestone on the road to a new Cold War, but it could serve as a wake-up call that will help the West to prevent it.

Alex Goldfarb is a co-author, with Marina Litvinenko, of Death of a Dissident: the Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the return of the KGB